DEMO: Cut, Copy, Paste

There are so many ways we can cut, copy and paste.

Copy, cut and paste in a folder

I'm inside a folder, so first of all, a copy and paste. What I can do is select this test folder and copy it, and notice that the paste button now lights up and I can now paste it. So I'm going to paste it, and now I've got a copy of that document.

The cut does the same thing. It goes to what's called the clipboard. So when I hit copy, it creates a copy of this inside the clipboard. When I hit the cut, what happens is not only does it copy it to the clipboard, but it also removes it from the original location. Now in this case it just turns it gray right here. Let's say I want to come out here to the desktop, and in this case I'm going to right click and say paste, and now it removes it from this folder and puts it over here. So it's kind of like a move. Essentially what I did was just move it from one location to another with this cut and paste right here.

Dragging

I could also do that with just dragging and dropping. Speaking of dragging and dropping, I can drag and drop like that, but I can also drag with the right mouse button, and now I get an option: do I want to copy here or move here? Maybe I want a copy here, so then I create a copy of, in this case it's a copy of the copy, so I've got a copy of the copy there.

Keyboard shortcuts

Of course, we have the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to create a copy of something, and I can paste it multiple times here. Or I can do a Ctrl+X, which removes it, and you can see that it's grayed out, and then I'll paste it over here with Ctrl+V and it pastes it over here and removes it from that original location. So Ctrl+X to cut, Ctrl+C to copy, and Ctrl+V to paste.

There's also the control key, and I really like the control key. When I drag something using the control key, notice it says copy to downloads, or I can bring it over here and copy to desktop. So if I'm holding down that control key and I drag it over here, now it creates a copy of it. We'll see in other programs how I really use this control key a lot.

The clipboard history

If I want to see what's inside the clipboard, I could hit Windows+V and it will bring up the clipboard right here. So let's go ahead and turn that on, and nothing here. What I'm going to do is open up a text document. So let's open up a text document and let's copy this. I'm going to do Windows+V, and then we're going to copy this, so I'll Ctrl+C. Oops, do the control key here, and Windows+V, and you can see that is pasted in here.

What's interesting about this is that I can actually end up copying multiple things to it. So I'm going to Ctrl+C on here, Ctrl+C on here, Ctrl+C on here. Now I'm going to hit the Windows+V and you can see that I've got multiple items in this clipboard. So I can go back and paste different items from the clipboard and go back in my history of things that I copied. So this is a pretty cool feature that I can use for copy and paste.

In other programs

What's great about this is that it works in other different programs as well. So for instance, I am in Microsoft Word online, and I can hold down the control key and drag this selected text somewhere else, and it just creates a copy of it here.

Here I'm inside Microsoft Word, the client, and instead what I'm going to do here is right click and drag. I get a menu: do I want to move here, or copy here, or create a link here? I'm going to copy here, and now it copies that selection.

Here I'm in Excel, and what I can do is I can move by clicking the border of this. I can move this number to another location. Or if I hold down the control key while I'm moving it, then what it will do is it'll create a copy of it.

Excel actually has some other cool features to it. For instance, let's say I want to copy this test. If I move around the edges, if I grab it by the edges, I'm just moving it. But if I move to the bottom right hand corner, I've got the fill series little box right there, and I can click this down and it will create a copy of it. But what's really cool about this fill series is, let's say I say test one and hit enter, and now I drag this down: it will actually create a series, so you see 1 through n. And it's pretty intelligent on what it can do. For instance, maybe I say January and then I fill a series of that, and you can see that now it's all the months of the year. So the fill series can be a fast way that you can do a lot of copies of things, and you can pull it both down and to the right.

Here's a PowerPoint presentation, just an example basic presentation here. In the slide sorter view I can click and drag these using the right mouse button and copy, or I can use the control key and copy something, and so it's a quick way to copy the slides. But also when I'm inside the slide, let's say I've got some shapes here and I'm going to create a few different shapes, maybe some text, and maybe I will insert an icon onto it as well. So we'll just do the first one here. Now I've got maybe some sort of picture that I'm creating, and I can select that, hold down the control key, and create a copy of it. So the control key, I just use it for a ton of stuff. It's just so nice to use and really cut, copy and paste things very quickly.

Paste special

There are times when I'll copy something that has some sort of formatting to it. So let's just copy something here and paste it into here, and what it will do is it will take the formatting that was over on the other page and bring it in. Well, I may not want to do that, so I do have this paste special option here. In this case right now it's just this drop down, and I can say keep source formatting or paste text only. So I'm going to paste text formatting only. Or if I didn't want to use that little menu item, I could do a paste special, so there's this drop-down arrow right here and I can paste text only. You can also see it's Ctrl+Shift+V, so I'm going to click that button, or I could hit Ctrl+Shift+V and paste it into there.

There's lots of options with cut, copy and paste, and I use a lot of them. It just depends on the scenario and what I'm working with. But these apply to many different programs out there, so it really is good to get really efficient.